The biggest target of obesity in North America? Soda. Many experts now claim that soda is the new tobacco -- indeed, Google those terms and you get more than 7 million hits. For them, Coke is the new Camel. Let me take a step back and note the basic problem in fighting obesity like we fought tobacco.

Provinces that propose to tax sugary beverages may increase their general revenues; but as a strategy to reduce the severe chronic illness and huge financial costs associated with obesity, it will fail to accomplish anything -- except expanding the power of bureaucrats.

Only you can manage your own diet and your own calorie intake. No government, no restaurant, no physician can do it for you. It's this complexity that makes personal health responsibility so important in reversing the obesity epidemic.

Obesity has become a "collective" issue that presumably concerns us all. Just last week, a coalition of health and education experts repeated their call for the Quebec government to introduce a sugar tax on soft drinks and so-called "energy drinks."